Stubborn
by village bicycle
Summary: Oneshot, post MR3. Life in the flock goes on as per usual – you know, camping out in wild forests and living off roasted squirrel. But soon the feelings between Max and Fang grow unbearable and create a tension between them, until Fang is forced to make a move. Will Max succumb, or will she just run away again? And, jeez, will Max every stop being so stubborn? FAXFAXYFAXFAX
1. Chapter 1

**This was my first oneshot I'd written (it isn't now, but it was when I originally uploaded it!) so keep that in mind while reading – I was about ten/eleven! I think. Hm.**

**I've been through and got rid of the couple mistakes I spotted (only tiny things, luckily!) so hopefully you guys are satisfied, hehe. I also realized how bad a few lines (**_**"And then she realized it. She loved him back!"**_** … honestly? Could that **_**get**_** any **_**worse**_**?) were and changed them. (**_**"**__**Their eyes met, and they found their lips meeting once again, but this time it was not heavy, not desperate. It was slow, deep, **_**loving**_**."**_ … **Okay, was I **_**legit**_**? That is dreadful. My somewhere-between-ten-and-eleven-year-old mind was the worst fluff-writer ever. Sweet baby Jesus. I mean, the writing skill itself was fine, but … ugh. Wow.)**

**Okay, read and review, now, my darlings!**

**PS –** **I made them fifteen (:**

**SUMMARY: **_**Life in the flock goes on as per usual – you know, camping out in wild forests and living off roasted squirrel. But soon the feelings between Max and Fang grow unbearable and create a tension between them, until Fang is forced to make a move. Will Max succumb, or will she just run away again? And, jeez, will she ever stop being so stubborn?**_

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><p>The flock sat huddled around a fire, within a forest in a huge jungle somewhere off in America — they didn't even know where themselves. Owls hooted from the trees, and stars glittered above them in the night sky.<p>

Gazzy and Iggy's heads were bent closely together, and the two whispered mischievously, hands playing with lengths of colored wire. Max rolled her eyes, and decided not to pursue them about that — yet.

Beside them sat Nudge and Angel, talking animatedly. Well, _Nudge_ was talking animatedly — Angel was just sitting there, pretending to listen to the flow of never ending talk while she groomed Celeste's soft white fur.

And a few meters away sat Max, hiding her grin from her flock as she watched them and their silly antics. Fang had disappeared off into the trees; Max assumed he just wanted some peace after the crazy events of the previous days.

After the battle at Itex, once the flock had come together once more, they just ... left. People were searching high and low for the famous 'flock', but they had simply disappeared. No sign of them in Germany, England, or even America; they had taken special care not to be seen.

Desperate teenagers, and, admittedly, adults, too, checked up daily on Fang's blog. Every night Fang _tried _to think of something to report, but to be honest, he and the flock had just been lying low. Relaxing. Enjoying the happy calm that so rarely entered their lives. So, really, there was nothing he could say.

Max sighed, and ran a hand through her long, dirty-blonde hair. _It's getting way too long,_ she thought to herself. It was past her waist, and all her hairties had disappeared; she'd have to hack it off soon with a knife.

'Don't do that, Max,' said Angel quietly. 'It's pretty.'

Max snorted. 'Pretty? Yeah, so is that dung stuff on NeoPets.'

'Omigosh! I remember that game!' exclaimed Nudge, beaming. 'I used to play it _all the time_! You guys always called it lame, but it was _the_ best thing since ... since ... since me! Hey, Max, can we go shopping?'

'We have everything we need already, for the moment, Nudge,' sighed Max, getting to her feet and dusting off her faded, torn jeans. 'What more do you want?'

Nudge rolled her eyes, as if the answer was the most obvious thing in the world and Max was just experiencing a fairly dumb day. 'Clothes! Duh!'

From where he sat, bent over the contraption that Max knew she'd end up scolding him and Iggy about, Gazzy looked up, astounded. 'Wow, only two words in a reply from Nudge! This is a world record!'

Iggy high-fived the younger bird-kid. 'Good work, bro,' he grinned. 'You're learning my sarcasm!'

Max cringed. 'That may not be a good thing. And no, Nudge, we are not getting any clothes.' At Nudge's pout, Max added, 'Maybe when all the fuss dies down, we can all spend the day shopping, okay?'

The beaming Nudge thanked Max quickly, but it was Iggy's turn to gape. 'Max? _Wanting_ to shop? And Nudge only saying two words in a reply? In the same day? I must be in a different dimension.'

Max glared at him. 'I _am_ a girl too, you know.'

'Pfft, doubt it,' Iggy muttered, under his breath. Max took a second to hit him over the head ('Ouch!' he yelped) before walking over to Angel's side.

'It's getting late, huh, sweetie? You tired?' Max asked kindly, stroking a strand of Angel's curly blonde hair behind her ear. Angel nodded and held back a yawn, hugging Celeste to her chest.

'Come on, then,' said Max gently. 'Let's get you into your sleeping bag and off to sleep. You too, Gazzy!' she added.

'Naw!' Gazzy whined. 'No, Max, please! We've almost finished this —'

'And what, exactly,' she said menacingly, her tranquil expression suddenly dark, _'is_ this?'

'Uh … um ...' stammered Gazzy, trying to find a way to cover up his mistake. 'We were just, uh, fixing up Fang's laptop. It … broke.'

Arms crossed, Max raised an eyebrow. 'Then why is it over there?'

'We're just fixing the mechanism inside of it and, um, stuff,' said Gazzy, eyes wide. Both he and Iggy sat stock-still, eyes wide and bodies rigid. They were obviously up to something, _again_.

Max rolled her eyes and decided to let it go. She'd punish them for the bomb (or at least, that's what she thought it was — she hoped it wasn't something worse. Or one of Iggy's stupid inventions) when it _really_ went off.

She went back to her spot by the fire and sat down, rubbing the cold palms of her hands together. She pushed down the sleeves of her darkly-colored hoodie (it helped to cover any blood stains) and shuddered, hit with a blast of sudden wind.

From close by, Nudge shrieked. 'It's ruining my hair!' she cried, trying to flatten her wild mess of chocolate curls.

'Sh,' hissed Max. 'Angel's sleeping!'

'No, it's okay,' murmured Angel, curling into a ball in her black sleeping bag. Max had made sure that all of their sleeping bags were dark, just in case someone was looking from above at night. During the day, they were tucked safely away anyway.

Pushing back her hair once again, Max went to Angel's side and stroked her cheek. 'Try and sleep,' Max said. 'Do you want me to extinguish the fire?'

'No! No, it's warm,' the youth replied, blinking her large, baby-blue eyes slowly.

'Okay, then,' said Max. 'Gaz! Ig! Nudge! All of you shush. Ange needs her sleep. And Gazzy, you do too. Come on.'

Gazzy huffed but got to his feet, giving his partner in crime a final high-five before going over to _his _sleeping bag. Max didn't miss the wide yawn that crossed his features when he thought she wasn't looking.

Silently, Iggy put the metallic contraption that he and Gazzy had created into his backpack, tucking in its wires and keeping it out of harm's way and, though he wouldn't say it to her face, Max's sight. He then came over to sit beside Max by the fire, beckoning for Nudge to join them.

After a minute of peaceful silence, Nudge whispered, 'Where's Fang?'

Max frowned. She'd just been thinking that herself. Where had he gone? He'd been out for quite a while, and there was no sign of him back at the place where they had set up camp.

'I'll go look for him,' Max said quietly. 'You two — start getting ready for bed. Well, sleeping bag. I know you won't say so, but you're both dead tired.'

Iggy sighed and raked a hand through his strawberry-blonde hair, milky blue eyes looking sightlessly into the thriving fire. He was silent.

Nudge, however, immediately began another of her rants, blabbing mindlessly about nothing much in particular and straying far from the topic of sleep. Max ignored Nudge and got to her feet, zipping up her hoodie to cover the thin grey tank top that hardly gave her any warmth. Without missing a beat, Iggy slapped a long-fingered hand over Nudge's mouth. She fell silent.

'I'll be back soon, guys,' Max said quietly. Before she left, she spotted a hairband around Nudge's mocha-skinned wrist; she snapped it off and quickly tied up her tangled mess of hair in a high ponytail, giving no care to how it looked before going into the trees that surrounded their clearing.

Max felt blind herself for a while. There was no sign of Fang anywhere; all that she could see was darkness, and occasionally the outline of a tree trunk. Twigs broke underneath her feet, no matter how lightly she walked, and her tucked brown feathers ruffled in unease. She felt as if someone was watching her ... but who could see in this darkness? Even with her enhanced raptor vision Max couldn't; she couldn't even spot the glowing full moon through the canopy above.

Suddenly a large hand reached out and yanked her back, another coming up to silence her mouth just before it cried for help. She struggled helplessly, but the person was bigger and stronger than her, and she eventually accepted the fact that she could do nothing.

'Calm down,' her captor hissed. 'It's just me.'

Max calmed down slightly, but she was still on edge. 'Fang?'

'Yes. Now shut up and follow me.'

'Uh, I can't see anything.'

Fang snorted. 'You get used to the darkness after a while.' He grabbed her wrist and pulled her after him; she ignored the tingles shooting up her arm, and instead focused on how jealous she was of his ability to walk silently.

Eventually, they came to a halt in another moonlit clearing, where there was a small waterfall flowing down from a rocky cliff into a pool of water. Fang sat himself on one of the large rocks on the edge of the pool, facing Max and releasing his hold on her. He looked up at the sky.

'Why'd you take me here?' Max asked bluntly. 'Have you been here this whole time?'

'Yeah,' he nodded. 'It's peaceful.'

Max shivered. 'It's freezing. How can you stand it?'

He raised a dark eyebrow at her, and she noticed that he wasn't even wearing a jacket over his black shirt, but he hardly appeared cold at all.

'Shut up,' she snapped, looking away.

With a roll of his obsidian eyes, Fang shook out his dark wings and stretched them to their full, fifteen-foot wingspan, before bringing them in a little and resting them over the rocks.

Max took the hint, and tried not to show surprise at the sudden act of kindness Fang was acting on. Instead, she walked over to him and sat at his side, snuggling into him. He wrapped one wing around her, and soon the cold subsided, to be replaced with pleasant warmth.

Max closed her eyes and rested her head on her best friend's shoulder, both of them sitting in silence.

After a while, Fang asked quietly, 'What's up with us?'

She kept her eyes closed, but raised an eyebrow. 'Nothing?'

'No, I mean ... _us.'_

Max was clueless. She lifted her head and looked at him, brown eyes meeting the black. 'Us?'

Fang huffed in impatience. 'You kissed me. I kissed you. You ran away.' Max blushed and looked at her hands, averting his eyes, but still he continued. 'Then we split up and you were hating on me, but when we saw each other again you hugged me as if there was no tomorrow. And yet, you ignore all of this. As if it's nothing.'

Max was quiet for a minute. She knew that he was telling the truth, but she was just so ... _afraid_ (though she wouldn't even admit it to herself, let alone Fang)_._ Of jeopardizing their friendship, of hurting the flock, of hurting _Fang_. Even of hurting herself. She was so scared of letting him down that she was unwilling to even _try._

Fang felt her muscles tense beside him. He looked at her, and tried not to be mystified at her beauty. And she didn't even _know._ She thought she was uglier than anything, ever, but in Fang's opinion, the truth was the total opposite. She was just stupid for thinking that in the first place.

He let out an inaudible sigh and closed his eyes. _Why does it have to be so hard?_ he asked himself bitterly. _Why does she have to be so freaking stubborn?_

Another sigh escaped his lips. He'd accepted it a long time ago. That he loved her. For a while, he never really _thought_ about it — he knew he felt _something _for her, but he didn't pay it much mind. When she kissed him on the beach, the day Ari practically ripped him to pieces, he was almost doing somersaults (mentally, of course. He'd never do that in real life). But the day he truly accepted it, truly knew that he was _in love_ with Maximum Ride, was the day he found her, sitting on the sandy shore of the beach, coated in blood.

His heart had almost stopped. He was _angry,_ and he was _scared,_ and he was so in love with her that it _hurt._ She had been in so much pain, and it pained him, too.

Now, Max whispered something next to him. Fang reopened his eyes and turned them to her, but she wouldn't meet his gaze.

'What was that?' he said, grazing his eyes over her hair, her cheekbones, her lowered brown eyes.

'It — it _was_ nothing,' she whispered, her own gaze still on her fingers as they picked at each other. It was a nervous habit of hers. 'There's nothing between us.'

Instead of being hurt or sad, like Max was expecting, Fang was angry. He got to his feet, and then before she could blink he had pulled her to him and was smashing his lips to hers.

She was frozen, unsure of what to do. Follow her head, and push him away? Or her heart, and kiss him back?

In the end, she did what all her instincts were telling her: she kissed him back. Her hands shyly crept up to his neck, fingers slowly raking through his hair.

Fang only kissed her harder, and soon, without either of them really registering how they had got there, he had her pinned up against a tree. His olive-skinned hands roamed over her sides almost roughly, and his tongue forced its way into her mouth. Max gasped, pressing herself closer to him and letting go of all thoughts.

Her hair had come undone a while back; his fingers combed through the knotted strands, smoothing them out with impossible gentleness even through the soft harshness of his kisses. Max's head tilted to the side, and he squeezed her waist affectionately. A rope of pleasure coiled in her stomach, igniting fireworks within her.

Seconds, minutes, hours, — maybe even days — later, their lips parted, both of them panting heavily. Fang pressed his mouth to her neck once, twice, three times, before muttering, 'That was nice.'

Max laughed breathily, pulling back a little but not removing herself from his arms. She rested her forehead on his chest, thinking.

She definitely wasn't cold anymore.

A little while later, Fang pulled away himself. 'We should go back,' he murmured, mussing up his hair with one of his hands.

Max nodded silently, but just before they entered the dark shadows of the trees she pulled him back to her, nuzzling his neck. Fang chuckled lowly and wrapped his arms around her, rubbing circles right in between her wings, where she liked it.

The bird girl breathed him in, letting her eyes drift shut as they stood there, practically motionless. She pressed a kiss to his collarbone, his neck, his shoulder, her mind drifting and then coming to a realization, and understanding of sorts. She whispered the words, but they were muffled by his neck and they missed his ears.

'Hm?' he said, absently twisting her hair into a knot at the nape of her neck.

'I ... I love you,' she whispered again, looking up at him. He met her gaze and she couldn't read him, couldn't decipher the emotions swirling through the obsidian of his eyes. He pressed his lips to hers anyway, sending all the things she had to say out the window. The kiss this time was soft, not rough, and Max sort of liked it more this way.

After separating their lips he raised her shirt slightly, just so her left hip showed. She was hesitant, but let him, ready to jump back if he did anything she didn't like. Luckily that didn't have to happen, though, as all he did was trace eleven letters on her bared flesh, raising goosebumps. _I love you too. _

Eventually, when the evitable became inevitable and Max's motherly instincts toward her flock took over, the two headed back to the makeshift campsite, hands linked. Iggy was the only one still awake.

'Hey,' he greeted, sightless eyes on the fire. 'You found him, I'm guessing?'

'Yeah,' Max replied. She released Fang's hand and went to check on the kids, laying a spare blanket over Angel's shivering body.

'Who's next watch?' Iggy asked, raising an eyebrow.

'Sure,' Fang said. He went to sit beside Iggy. 'I'll take it in five.'

'I'll go after you, Fang,' Max quickly cut in, obviously wishing to spend some "quality time" with her new-found romance. Fang rolled his eyes and nodded, smirking lopsidedly.

They were silent for a short while, until Iggy commented, 'You guys were out for a while.' He cleared his throat, obviously stuffing back laughter. 'Have fun out there? All alone, in the dark and cold? You must've been cold.' He paused, and then – 'Did you warm each other up?' He couldn't hold in his guffaws at that point.

Max struggled to hide her flushed cheeks as she went to her sleeping bag without another word, but instead of getting in it, carried it over to where Fang and Iggy sat. She set it down beside the former then wordlessly crawled in, lying at Fang's feet. He leant down to stroke her hair lightly, then uprighted himself before beginning mindless chatter with Iggy (and answering his friend's interrogation once they were both sure Max had fallen asleep).

And when the time came, he didn't wake Max for her watch. He allowed her to sleep, and smirked at the idea of her reaction when she _did_ wake.

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><p><strong>I'd like to think that was much better than it was before, even if I only changed a few subtle grammatical errors and horrible lines. Eh.<strong>

**Review, review, review, review! Review or I will summon my army of Inferi and make them attack you the same way they attacked Harry! And then you'll be pulled underwater and they'll be all over you, trying to kill you, but you'll have no Dumbledore to save you! Bwahaha! **

**Thus, you should review.**

**Love,**

**Jimmy ;p**


	2. Chapter 2

**Hey, guys!**

**I'm actually sort of just posting this A/N so the story appears on the archive. I improved the original oneshot and now I want people to see that, so! **

**This A/N is pretty much pointless, in that case, BUT if any of you are interested in adopting my story 'Focus on the Shadows' (which I am giving up unless someone takes it by July 21****st****), then just let me know because I'll be happy to give it to you (if I like your writing style and everything). I doubt anyone will go check it out, but oh well. **

**Nothing left to say but, well, review! Shucks, I'm flattered.**

**Jimmy (who is female, if any of you were wondering)**


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